How to Blog Almost Every Day – Use the Inverted Pyramid story format

Chris Brogan provides this framework for writing a blog post (almost) every day. He adds that while it’s not easy, once you develop the right habits, they stick with you. I’m writing quite regularly now, but it took me several years to get my groove down to a science.

Get the post up fast, not perfect. You can edit if you have to, later. Perfectionism kills good habits.

Dissect other people’s posts to understand what makes them tick. The more you understand HOW they write, the more you can take the best parts of it into how you write. (hint, my 27 blogging secrets post gives you my patterns.)

Find useful and interesting pictures. I use Flickr photos licensed under Creative commons for most of my photos.

Think about what your customers and prospects need. I write from the perspective of the communities I serve. This focus takes some weight off my worries about what I should write about or not. I write about what my community needs.

How I Blog Every Day

I tend to use the inverted pyramid format when writing longer posts, i.e. as opposed to short snippets.
The “pyramid” is a triangle.

The top represents the most substantial, interesting, and important information you want to convey.

The middle section discusses the main points of your article, often as bullet points and

The tapered lower portion illustrates that other material should follow in order of diminishing importance.

Ken Blake, Ph.D. explains how it works on the Tennessee State University site: “Journalists use many different kinds of frameworks for organizing stories. Journalists may tell some stories chronologically. By far the simplest and most common story structure is one called the “inverted pyramid.”

Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace

Jakob Nielsen adds that “On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don’t scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail.”